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Comment by Emma_Goldman | Hacker News Reader

I've never heard a police helicopter at night in the country where I live (UK). I rarely see or hear them at all.

Edit: After googling, it looks like there are about 2000 police helicopters in the US, but only 20 in the UK. As far as I can tell, there are the same number of police helicopters in LA as across the whole of the UK.

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Pretty common in my country [Oceania], it stays out all night only going back for fuel so they supervise any calls they get, as it's already out.

The US is about 40 times bigger than the UK, according to Wolfram Alpha.

"there are the same number of police helicopters in LA as across the whole of the UK"

Police helicopters tend to be heavily concentrated in cities. A better metric might be population. The US population is only about 5 times bigger than that of the UK. It therefore has 20x more police helicopters per capita.

Police helicopters are also more heavily used in poorer (and higher crime, but also more heavily policed in general, thus inflating crime statistics) areas of those cities.

They’re primarily used to hunt for escapees, and to keep eyes on someone running or involved in a chase. Poor areas don’t have the resources to buy a police helicopter, that’s why they’re sometimes loaned to other departments in these situations. I have never seen or heard of one being deployed to control poor people.

My country doesn't have different departments. One department for the whole country / state.

They make use of helicopters typically before a car arrives.

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